Recess’s mission is to support the creative process of contemporary artists by providing a space forproductive activity and a platform for a partnership with the public. By offering artists flexible work/ exhibition space, artists are given agency to determine the visibility of their work and the parameters of its presentation.

Free of charge and open to the public, Recess facilitates everyday interactions between artists and thecommunity in order to promote the productive space of the working artist as a site of valuable visual and intellectual interactions. Our endeavors offer critical exposure for the artists we support while fostering an inclusive environment in which artists and the public can engage in a meaningful exchange of art and ideas.

Recess was formed in May 2009 to address concerns that emerging artists cannot afford to live or workin proximity to exhibition communities. Securing a platform to gain visibility and develop creative goals and a professional career is often a daunting task. The organization was likewise founded to actively respond to changing modes of production. Contemporary artwork, unlike more traditional forms, can be site-specific, performance-based or ephemeral in nature. The traditional gallery space is often unable to accommodate the interactive, process-based artistic production. The artist’s studio is also changing: no longer bound to conventional space, the studio of the contemporary artist is the street, the gallery, or anywhere the practitioner chooses to work. Session was conceived to directly take on the evolving conditions of contemporary art, realizing ambitious projects that don’t always “fit” in the customary context.

On March 25th, 2014, Takashi Horisaki and Nina Horisaki-Christens will begin work on Metabolic Morphology as part of Recess’s signature program, Session. Session invites artists to use Recess’s public space as studio, exhibition venue and grounds for experimentation.

Inspired by Soho’s signature architectural form – the cast iron building – the main component of Metabolic Morphology will take the form of a semi-modular installation of cast colored latex and vacuum-formed plastic elements that will be rearranged and expanded upon over the course of the project. These forms will derive their basic aesthetics from casts of sections of actual buildings in Soho, including Recess’s own space, which will then be draped, stretched, and otherwise manipulated over plastic and wire structures. The modular components will then be suspended in arrangements that, when altered, trigger sound recordings detailing the histories of the neighborhood by its inhabitants, tying together the physical and narrative records of this urban space.

Metabolic Morphology takes as its conceptual basis both an awareness of the complex nature of urban development in Tokyo and New York, and the specific history of the Soho neighborhood, where ideas of modular architectural components seem particularly apt given the trajectory that cast-iron buildings set for architecture. Allowing the entire facade of a structure to be cast quickly and at lower cost than ornamental stone constructions, cast iron paved the way for more radical forms of pre-fabricated and modular architectures in the decades that followed. At the same time, this Soho was also intimately associated with evolving concepts of modernism through its artistic inhabitants, including prominent minimalist artists, whose work speaks to such modernist component-based aesthetics, taking them to their universalizing extreme, and Fluxus artists who sought a more open ended collaborative aesthetic. Drawing from these local histories, the artists seek to explore an urban aesthetic that melds modernist simplification with the heterogeneity of reality, hybridizing simple interchangeable geometries with unique ornamental details in an organic fashion.

Ultimately Horisaki and Horisaki-Christens would like to acknowledge the physicality of our urban environment, recognizing the tension it contains in balancing history with the drive toward technological innovation, and organizational structure with the uncoordinated forces of development.

Session at Recess: Jan 8 – March 22Performances at The Kitchen: March 27-29, 8pmPlease check Recess website for schedule updates.

On January 8, 2014, Liz Magic Laser will begin work on Bystander as part of Recess’s signature program, Session. Session invites artists to use Recess’s public space as studio, exhibition venue and grounds for experimentation.

Bystander will be developed at Recess through a series of interviews conducted by journalists and actors with members of the public. Laser will work with her collaborators to produce a script based on interview responses. The culminating performance will stage a dialogue between television news production and its viewers. Reversing expected roles, professional newscasters will deliver subjective testimonies while actors, representing the public, offer factual reports.

Both the Session and final performances will be staged in a functioning newsroom installation, replete with time zone clocks. By re-contextualizing the television news scenario as theatrical dialogue, Laser lays bare the mechanisms at play in the presentation and reception of current events.

About the artist:Liz Magic Laser (b. 1981, New York) lives and works in Brooklyn. Her performances and videos intervene in semi-public spaces such as bank vestibules, movie theaters and newsrooms, and have involved collaborations with actors, dancers, reporters, surgeons, and motorcycle gang members. She earned a BA from Wesleyan University (2003) and an MFA from Columbia University (2008). She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (2008) and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (2009). Most recently, her work was the subject of solo exhibitions at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2013) the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany (2013); DiverseWorks, Houston, Texas (2013) and Mälmo Konsthall, Mälmo, Sweden (2012). Her work has also been exhibited at Lisson Gallery, London (2013); the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2012); Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2012); the Performa 11 Biennial, New York (2011); The Pace Gallery, New York (2011); the Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2011); and MoMA PS 1, New York (2010). Laser is the recipient of grants from Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation Grant (2013), the Southern Exposure Off-Site Graue Award (2013), New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2012) and the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art (2010). She was the 2013 Armory Show Commissioned Artist and has been in residency at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program, New York (2012), Forever & Today, Inc.’s Studio On The Street artist-in-residence program, New York (2012), Smack Mellon, Brooklyn (2011) and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York (2009).

Over the course of his Session, Satterwhite will create a 3D animated video using drawing, CG animation, and improvised and mediated performance. A continuation of The Matriarch’s Rhapsody, the series will continue to employ dance, performance, drawing, video and photos from public and private archives, combining these forms into new possibilities for generating narrative.

Thus far, videos in the series The Matriarch’s Rhapsody, have exclusively employed the artists’ own body as a sole character. For Grey Lines, the artist will invite strangers to perform a series of actions based on a selection of 300 graphite line drawings and become part of the fabric of the larger work. Satterwhite will shoot visitors to the space in a green screen lab as well as offsite on the streets of Soho.

For Circular Track, Orr will research the ways in which choreographed movement constructs narrative. Using the tracking shot to explore how representation operates in video, film and performance, Orr will create her own circular track and dolly system while developing a comprehensive understanding of the historical use of the tracking shot. Her Session will culminate in a performance with the circular track along with an exhibition of her research.